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Fahd Burki

Fahd Burki’s work is based on constructing a personal mythology of symbolic archetypes that eschews chronological categorization. His formalistic approach is marked by a strong graphic sensibility and a tendency to reduce his ideas to their most essential elements. His static totemic Composites oscillate between body and architecture alluding to states of being, while closed forms and carefully observed symmetry signals an interiorization of possibility, a kind of subjective unity that is only possible in fantasy; the fantasy of omnipotence. Burki’s mythological elsewhere treads the vast terrain between primitivism and science fiction, always searching for the ideal configuration; a universal monumentalism.
Often borrowing from contemporary and traditional sources ranging from popular culture to Native American iconography, Burki’s ambiguous objects maintain neutrality that allows them to remain semantically flexible. The digitally printed collage elements in Burki’s paintings add illusory depth and set an otherwise static composition into a state of transition from two dimensionality to three dimensionality. A similar coexistence of opposing forces can be sensed in the sculptures; the primitive simplicity of a wooden form is offset by machined craftsmanship or by the introduction of synthetic materials.